Viewo over the majestic Fish River Canyon, the second biggest canyon in the world

The Fish River Canyon was the last signpost of Africa and of our trip, a very metaphorical travel landmark where we all realized we were getting to the end and most of all the real Africa had been left behind.

A place of extraordinary beauty, the second biggest canyon in the world gave all of us the emotion of one of the most stunning sunsets seen around the world. The sky started to slowly change shape and colors and become redder and redder. The clouds looked almost like been blown away by the wind a the horizon, and while the sun painted the entire sky in bloody red colors in front of our eyes.

The Fish river canyon was a great nice feeling of renewed hopes and happiness after the malaria adventure with Anna Begga. Both extremely tired, i think we were also the happiest to be back on the road and somewhere different once more, and somewhere beautiful again.

This is the page I wrote just after it, when a bit of melancholy started to take over the excitement of the day. Africa was disappearing from the horizon and this is what I felt over there.

Namibia June 4th, 2013

We are no leaving Namibia, this enchanting land that signed the end of the real Africa but that, on only 3 weeks, managed to steal our hearth anyway, with its dreamlike landscapes, among red sand dunes, ghost towns, the wonder of the Fish River Canyon and its unforgettable sunsets, where it looked almost like you could see the sky getting painted by an invisible hand.

The 11 of the group who made it to Cape Town

The desert is slowly disappearing at the horizon, bringing with him its silences, the infinite, its neverending spaces. Soon e will enter South Africa and even if we are still in Africa, still on this continent, this passage will really sign the end of this journey through such an unbelievable continent , an extraordinary land of extraordinary beauty, the end of a unique experience that will be not only impossible to forget but also impossible to properly describe, a land I start to miss already now, today, here . Namibia has been a perfect way to smooth the hard passage between Africa and South Africa, a smooth way to come back to the white world. We need its deserts to rest our mind and absorb the shock of finding ourselves out of Africa. Its hot showers have helped us to make everything easier and smoother even though I have already often missed the non white world, left over there, just behind the other border of this country.

The sun in Namibia has become colder, the air at night chiller and there is a bit if sadness in the atmosphere, like it is always at the end of a big travel.. te landscape around is surreal, we cross infinite kilometers of nothing, of desert, whose beauty gives us the last ecstatic African emotion.

Desert roads

Roads and long and empty in namibia. Sometimes we come across a small village that is different from those crossed in all the apst months not only for shape and dimension but mostly for the life in ti, that social life lived outside, shared together, the kids screams and smiles,the noise in the street, the women smiles, the smell of food and the sound of loud radios, the life of that world that we had slowly learned to live in and love and that has suddenly disappeared down here.

I am leaving the real Africa, my Africa right here , where I leave a piece of my traveller hearth , too. It is here that travel dreams come to rest!